The last week of October, still with no conscious memory of that night being in any way unusual, I decided that I couldn't live a moment longer in New York. The city streets seemed hideously dangerous. Our cabin was a dark, terrible place, one that I could not bear ever to enter again. I felt out of control, as if anything could happen, and might.
I decided that I wanted to move to Austin. I went to the University of Texas there, and it is a city that both Anne and I love. Some of our best friends, including my collaborator James Kunetka, live there.
I insisted on putting both the cabin and the apartment on the market.
After Halloween we went down to Texas and arranged for our son to attend a local private school and began the process of buying a house.
We got an offer on our cabin, but no interest in the apartment.
One evening in Austin we were looking at the house we had chosen to buy. My wife was inside talking to the realtor and the owners. I walked out onto the deck.
When I looked at the dark canyon that stretched out into the shadows, and the stars in the evening sky, I felt suddenly and absolutely afraid. It was exactly as if the sky were a living thing, and it was watching me.
What was even more frightening was my clear awareness that this was a paranoid fantasy.
I thought then that my mental health was not good, and soon I would either have to calm down or take steps to Improve it.
But I could not live in that house. In fact, I could never enter it again.
When I changed my mind and decided to stay in New York, my wife was understandably furious. Then I accused her of being the one who had wanted to move us to Austin.
There followed a crisis. She really thought that she might have to leave me, because life together was just getting intolerable. But we are a deep marriage, and her despairing threat to separate made me quell my extreme behavior. It was not until Christmas that I really began to feel better.
Sitting in my office that afternoon in February I took stock of all I had found out. I had promised Hopkins that I wouldn't read anything about unidentified flying objects. In the past, as I have said, my interest in the subject was minimal. I have certainly read a book or two about them. Pressing myself I thought maybe I could remember seeing something years ago in Look magazine about somebody named Hill being taken aboard a flying disk. (In July 1986 I got copies of the issues involved — October 4 and 18, 1966-and I do not think that I actually read them at the time. I must have seen something about the story, though, because I remember it. Maybe there was a report in the newspaper.) Judging from what the other witnesses reported, something had happened. But what?
Even after talking to Hopkins, I was by no means willing to ascribe my experiences to the UFO phenomenon. I wanted to be quite clear: I had no idea what had gone on that night.
There did seem to be a lot of confusion, though, and perhaps even an emotional response on my part greatly out of proportion to what seemed a minor disturbance.
TWO
O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.
The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
- W. H. AUDEN ,
"As I Walked Out One Evening"
DOWN THE CAVE OF MIND
Hypnosis
The Uncertain Mirror
My next step was clear. I was going to become involved with a therapist. But I had certain criteria. It could not be somebody who believed anything in particular about visitors or the disk phenomenon. The ideal therapist would have an open mind: I could have a mental problem. It might or might not have components unknown to science. Or it could be just what it seemed.
Because of the evident presence of fear-induced memory lapses and even possible amnesia, this therapist would have to be a skilled hypnotist as well. And again, not just any psychiatrist using hypnosis in his practice would do. I wanted somebody with a reputation in the scientific community as a real expert. I wanted both scientific rigor and therapeutic skill-and the two are not always present in the same person.
I chose not to approach any hypnotist to whom Hopkins had made previous referrals, despite the excellence of their credentials. One of these, Dr. Aphrodite Clamar, had worked extensively with Hopkins and was a very fine and highly professional psychologist, but I was firm in my desire to do this with somebody who had had no previous involvement.
Hopkins remembered that Dr. Donald Klein of the New York State Psychiatric Institute had expressed interest in the phenomenon and appeared to be open-minded about it. I looked up Dr. Klein's credentials and found them to be superb. If he would take me on, he was the ideal man.
A few weeks later I was in his office undergoing a searching three-hour pre-interview. I had provided him with a document outlining all my memories. We worked for some time trying to find ways into my mind, but I could recall little more than I already had. At his suggestion, I spent a week trying to do so. When I was not successful — in fact, all I got out of it was dizziness and strange nightmares — we decided on a trial hypnosis session.
I was dubious about hypnosis. I'd read in Science News of a study that suggested that anybody under hypnosis can be induced to remember a "UFO abduction and experience," complete with little men and all the trimmings. The hypnotist has only to ask the right questions. and the stories apparently just come pouring out.
It is a flat-out myth that people can't lie under hypnosis. They can and they will — if they think that's what the hypnotist wants them to do, or if they themselves want to do it.
When I got a more careful look at the study I had read about in Science News, I found that the questions asked were intentionally leading ones, specifically designed to evoke abduction memories. This study had as its purpose to prove that anybody can be induced to relate an abduction experience under hypnosis if he or she is asked questions designed to suggest that the hypnotist wanted him or her to relate such an experience.
Well, there was no chance at all that Dr. Klein was going to do that. This can easily be confirmed by the reader, as all the transcripts of my hypnosis sessions are verbatim. And I was very much hoping that the process would dispel the whole notion of the visitors and prove that — despite appearances — the experience had been a complicated series of misperceptions.
Still, the study illustrated a very good point and revealed a fundamental difficulty even with serious and competent efforts to use hypnosis in dealing with this sort of material.
We just don't know enough about hypnosis to call it a completely trustworthy scientific toot in a situation like this. While Don Klein certainly didn't ask provocative questions, there is always the possibility that I was unconsciously eager to comply with an outcome that I might secretly have longed for. I might wont powerful visitors to appear, to save a world that I'm pretty sure is in serious trouble. I'd spent the past three years working on books about nuclear war and environmental collapse. I knew full well that we are going to have a really rough time in the next fifty years. Maybe the idea of visitors coming along and saving our necks was more appealing to me than I might consciously have wished to admit. Maybe I hid my desperation from myself in order to live and raise a child with anything like a happy heart.